Push the Key

The fur is still flying.

MediaBistro’s Galleycat reports that John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics’ Circle, blames the decline of reading in America on the Republican Party. In an impassioned post (“Land of the Book Free”) to the Guardian of London’s book blog, Freeman complained that there was not a book or newspaper to be found along the Strip in Las Vegas. Even in NYC, the home of the National Book Critics Circle, Freeman claims that “books are becoming scarcer,” which makes New York no different than the rest of the country (“You can go miles in many American towns without seeing anything bound between covers”). The AP-Ipsos poll results only confirmed what Freeman had been seeing with his own eyes.

How did we get to this place?

While Freeman seems to agree with Steve Wasserman, the former editor of the LA Times Book Review, who said “Reading has always been a minority taste in America,” he also thinks that something new is happening here, something that “has to do with how a culture operates when all values become subservient to that of making money - when reading is not supported either from on top or from below.” Freeman sees the last twenty-five years as an assault on literacy and the reading culture by Republicans and conservatives determined to eliminate the welfare/education industrial complex that supported and promoted such elitist, effete, non-moneymaking pursuits. The industries that used to supported reading, Freeman wrote, “have been ground up and fed through the increasing corporatisation of American life.”

Freeman’s shot across the bow inspired Pat Schroeder, president and CEO of the American Association of Publishers, to do her part for the Right Side in the culture wars. Responding to a question about why she thinks liberals read more than conservatives (a finding of the AP-Ipsos poll), she said, “The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: ‘No, don’t raise my taxes, no new taxes. It’s pretty hard to write a book saying, ‘No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes’ on every page.”

Not helpful.

For an interesting answer to Freeman and the AP poll, see (via Galleycat) Meg Gardiner’s blog post (“Americans don’t read? Puh-leeze”). Gardiner, an American novelist living in London, takes issue with much of what Freeman had to say. But in the end, she was “just shocked to see a self-appointed shepherd of high culture regard his fellow citizens with quite such open contempt.”